Jacques Ellul Quotes

The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action.

The secret to modern propaganda is to simplify and repeat.

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.

Give me the writing of a nation's advertising and propaganda, and I care not who governs its politics.

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.

Propaganda today relies for the most part on repetition of catchwords that leaders wish listeners to accept on their face value without critical scrutiny, suppression of information that debates those catchwords, and rationalization of their cause to foment passions in the interest of the state or party.

The easiest way to propagandize people is to let a propaganda theme go in through an entertainment picture when people do not realize they are being propagandized.

Russia has a long history of propaganda and trying to influence various nation's cultures and elections. It's happening. They seem to have stepped up their game.

Of course, we [ with Edward Herman] have a purpose: namely, to encourage readers to undertake what might be called "a course in intellectual self-defense," and to suggest ways to proceed; in other words, to help people undermine the dedicated efforts to "manufacture consent" and to turn them into passive objects rather than agents who control their own fate.

Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.

We're in a world of propaganda. Some of it is all to effective.

The broad mass of a nation will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one. The greater the lie, the greater chance that it will be believed. All epoch-making events have been produced not by the written, but the spoken word.

In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.

The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable - if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.

We studied Western journalists' reporting methods, fed them story ideas, steered them toward sympathetic interviewees, and supplied them with the revolutionary movement's facts and figures.

I set the propaganda machine in motion. Now we will see what the apparatus will do.

What's public is propaganda, what's secret is serious.

The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by the demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups...So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

The primary purpose of the media is to mobilize support for the controlling interests.

Russia has always been involved in propaganda and disinformation.

We're learning a tremendous amount of propaganda from television and the Internet.

The BBC is very aware of its role in shaping people's consciousness… it's manipulative and deeply political.

The Russians know that well executed disinformation, when exercised tactically, can quickly metastasize.

Technology's become the great prism for what's going on in the world.